Stuff Flies As Malcolm Turnbull, Others Tangle With MyRepublic

That, he said, was due to the Abbott Government’s move to a “multi-technology mix” (MTM), rather than the all fibre-to-premise system employed in Singapore.

Turnbull gave Rodriguez full credit for entering the Aussie market and seeking to stimulate more demand for higher-end products. But he pointed out Singapore is a market utterly unlike Australia’s. “Passing each premises with superfast broadband costs a small fraction of what it costs in Australia,” he said.

And he added: “The NBN is hardly the only company in the world rolling out a multi-technology mix. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has recently announced an expansion of its fibre-to-the-node network, to cover 80 per cent of its fixed line footprint by 2018, while there have also been mass deployments by BT Openreach in the UK, AT&T in the US, and many others.”

Our colleagues at Communications Day have been rather more scathing. Wrote founder Graeme Lynch yesterday: “The idea that MyRepublic could barge into Australia and profitably offer low-contention gigabit or even unlimited FttH-derived 100Mbps plans for under $50 or, for that matter, $80 under any style of NBN tech mix- ALP or Coalition-can only be described in one word. Bulls**t.”